Tuesday, 7 June 2011

Chocolate brioche bread and butter pudding

I made the last blog (sausage pasta bake) when my youngest had a friend over and then she said she wanted a cooked pudding as well. This is always a great back up when you need to make something quickly and usually you have in the ingredients in the house.

I tend to use chocolate chip brioche but you can use normal brioche or croissants or pain au chocolat (or even just bread). The main thing though is that it needs to be stale- so a few days old.

I used about 8 individual chocolate chip brioches for this dish but you can adapt it to what you have in and the size of your dish (and how many you are serving).

Cut the brioche up into slices and spread all over the ovenproof dish so that it is completely covered. If you are using plain bread you should butter it first. Anything like croissants, brioche etc that contains a lot of butter shouldn't need any extra. If there are no chocolate chips in the bread product you are using then at this point sprinkle 50g-100g chocolate chips (depending on taste and amount of bread used) over the bread.

Then make the custard-base. Put 50g sugar and 3 eggs into a dish.

Mix until well combined. Meanwhile heat the contents of a can of light evapourated milk until just simmering and then pour in the egg mix and whisk well. If you wanted this to be a more chocolatey dessert you can add a tablespoon cocoa powder to the milk when you are first heating it to make the custard chocolate as well.

Pour this custard over the brioche and push the brioche all down into the custard and leave to stand for 5 minutes or so so that the brioche all soaks up the custard.

This can be left in the fridge until you need it (so another great dish you can prepare in advance which is always a help!) Once you are ready to bake it pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees and then back for 30 minutes until golden brown.

Serve with custard, cream or ice-cream. So easy and always goes down a storm!